Rich Mintz  

Chuck Colson died this weekend. For those who are too young to know who he is (i.e., pretty much everyone younger than me): he was a political hack who worked for Richard Nixon, was convicted of obstruction of justice, and spent seven months in prison. (Think of him as a low-rent Karl Rove.)

In later life, he became an “evangelical Christian,” which in latter days, unfortunately, has become code for “nasty right-wing bigot.” Colson said things about gay people that I can say without hesitation would have disgusted Jesus, and said them often.

No one “deserves” to die, but I certainly won’t miss this bitter old man who used his social power to spit on people like me, on our families and on our honest, earnest lives. (The question of why a disgraced felon, who used his position to attack and defame others for political gain and was rightfully sentenced to prison for it, regained social power says more about America’s hypocrisy than it does about Colson, but that’s a subject for another post.)

The fact that Colson cloaked his words in the disguise of reason and the confidence of social power doesn’t make him less of a fomenter of hate. What it makes him is a thug.

And today I have to sit through nonsense online from the whole of the Christian right, hailing Colson as a hero. Excuse me, but this hypocritical old felon claimed the mantle of Jesus Christ while preaching the vilest hatred against people like me and my family.

Plenty hasn’t changed in the 35 or so years I’ve been alive and politically aware, but one thing that has changed is that hundreds, thousands, on a good day millions of people in America are willing to call hate speech what it is. Good for us, and keep it up, everyone.

When someone says gay people are worthless or immoral, or our lives are without meaning, or our families are illegitimate, speak up! Say, “um, hello, I am here and listening, and you can take that nonsense and [forcibly place it in an appropriate location, outside the public discourse].”

Or, if the someone is Chuck Colson, “shove it.” I owe no justification or explanation to someone who says my life is “morally problematic” and I am not a full person, entitled to the rights of a full person. That someone deserves to be shunned, as Jesus would have shunned him. Rest in peace, but leave the rest of us alone.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed that I take the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay hate group masquerading as a pro-family organization, very seriously. I push back in earnest at @nomtweets on Twitter, call out lies and distortions, and generally act as though I care what they say.

I might well do otherwise. Even in America, slow as change is to come here, marriage for gay people will be routine in a generation. The shaving cream is out of the can, and it isn’t going back inside. NOM is on the wrong side of demographics, and of history. An organization that calls itself “pro-family” while it spends donors’ money trying to find children who will denounce their parents on camera shouldn’t be surprised to be treated as a bunch of laughable hypocrites. Besides, I have twice as many Twitter followers as they do, so what does it matter?

It matters.

In 1980, I was fourteen years old. I was already a gay person then (for that matter, I was already one a decade earlier, but that’s a subject for another post). But the overall tone of press and the public discourse about gay people, even after a decade of sexual revolution and social liberation, was one of pity and scorn. Gay people, even in big cities like Los Angeles (where I grew up) and New York (where I live now), were not real people or full people in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Gay people did, of course, exist, even in the media. They had jobs, mostly in fashion or hairdressing or flight-attending; they had boyfriends, or even “lovers.” The really edgy ones had “domestic partners.” And, as everyone knew, all of them had sex, and quite a lot of it, too.

But despite surface similarities, gay people weren’t Like Us. They lived in the city and didn’t even mind! (suspicious behavior, in those days). They stayed up late! They were stunted, big children with no responsibilities; they spent their money on fun and frolic; but at bottom, their lives were empty and sad.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973, and the rest of the culture took 20 years to catch up.

Like every gay person who lived in those times, I absorbed the trivialization of gay people, of our lives and our loves. As recently as 10 or 15 years ago — when I was 30, 35! — the idea of gay marriage startled me, because I had been conditioned to think of my love as somehow not real love, my family as somehow not a real family. The inevitable consequence of that is that one comes to think of himself as less than fully human.

Now, I’m a relatively healthy person with loving family and friends and a sound sense of self-respect, so I survived. And I had come across examples in my own life of gay people who were fully realized human beings and paid no mind to anyone who said or thought otherwise, so I grew into a more or less comfortable gay adult.

But not everyone has my advantages.

Who I marry will make absolutely no difference to the life of anyone in, say, Missouri. But every time the odious Maggie Gallagher goes on TV to sneer at gay families, every time a NOM “social scientist” “publishes” a “study” “proving” that the children of gay parents are stunted and lead empty lives (sound familiar?), every time the name of Jesus Christ is invoked in order to mock the holy and human experiences of people like me — every time these things happen, a few thousand fragile kids in Missouri learn false lessons that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to unlearn.

They learn that their feelings are bad, that their experiences aren’t real, that their choices are indecent, that there may never be anyone to love or understand them. They learn to conceal themselves from those who most love them, and to live lives that aren’t true in order to protect themselves from pain and sadness.

I emphasize again that I grew up very fortunate: intelligent and well educated, in a financially stable family, loved and encouraged by parents who were not afraid to let me roam the world, taught to question and think for myself.

And it still took me twenty years of adulthood to come to understand that the way God made me was good and right.

The voice of the anti-gay American right wing (because, at this point, in the Western world, this sort of frenzied, spluttering denial of the humanity of gay people is largely confined to the Christianist American right wing) is mistaken. Its message is false. It’s simply wrong. Gay people are real people, fully human; our experiences are authentic and true and good; as a community, our lives and our loves can survive provincialism and fear and negativity.

But as the fragile individuals we are when we are alone in the dark with our thoughts, we are hurt by all that vile nonsense, discrimination masquerading as science, angry clannishness masquerading as the word of Jesus Christ (who would be startled and shamed to hear the things said in his name).

The relationship between NOM mouthpiece Brian Brown and his God is a matter for them to work out between themselves. But the God who (as Brian believes) sent his son to clear away the old covenant to make way for a new one, and to die for the sins of lepers and prostitutes and swindlers, is not a God who would countenance, for instance, pitting black people against gay people, or encouraging children to denounce their parents. Or, for that matter, as is currently happening in Minnesota, sending hate squads into Catholic high schools to teach young people that gay people are a cancer on society. (Again, a matter for another post.)

So speak out against hatemongering; speak out against fear. Speak out for happiness, yours and those of others. Speak out and say that you are fully human, fully American, fully Christian (if that’s what you are). Say that your experience of life is real and legitimate; describe it; help others to understand it, that they may protect you from those who (through fear, or malice, or whatever — it’s not your concern) undertake to hurt you.

Speak out.

Earlier this week, Ryan Adams of McKinsey & Company’s Social Sector Office tweeted this Stanford list of the “top 10 books on the economics of poverty.”

This is a topic I’ve had an interest in for a long time, and I’ve read in and around it from time to time. I’ve got two of Jeffrey Sachs’ books queued up at the moment (one of which is on the Stanford list), and once I get through them I’ll check out some of those others.

One in a series. First post

Mia Birk writes:

1. Look beyond the bike: bicycle transportation succeeds best when combined with investments in compact development, transit, and walking. Engage in and support various efforts to help shape your sustainable community.

Bicycling is not an end; it’s a means. Sure, biking has lots of benefits (you live longer, you get places easier, you spend less, you interact with strangers more, you’re more connected to your city and neighborhood, etc. times 100). But at the end of the day, investing in bike infrastructure will only do so much to change the character of your community. What really makes change happen is proceeding from two first principles: (1) everyone’s needs matter, and (2) when in doubt, think simpler.

“Compact development,” “transit,” and “walking” described every urban area in the world until about 1950. (Within my own father’s lifetime, Los Angeles had a functional fixed-rail commuter transit system covering hundreds of miles.) Then you-know-what happened. And you don’t have to accept a conspiracy, just accept that for lots of economic and cultural reasons that suddenly aligned, society changed in a way that left us with a lot more cars, disinvestment in public transportation infrastructure, and two generations of auto-centric cultural assumptions.

Things used to be different, and they can be different again. But remember that “bicycle facilities” and “bicycle culture” are just subsets of “human-scaled facilities” and “human-scaled culture.” If you focus broadly on the latter, rather than narrowly on the former, you end up with a mutually reinforcing system (more people bike from home because they know they can take their bikes on the subway, which leads to more bike parking in the city, which leads to a broader range of people trying out biking, which leads to a broader range of bike types on the market, which leads to… etc.).

Portland community activist Mia Birk has probably done as much as anyone in the United States to advance a subculture in which driving everywhere alone in a car is not taken for granted as the only legitimate transportation option. Janette Sadik-Khan’s and Mike Bloomberg’s transformative changes to New York probably wouldn’t have happened in the way they have without Birk and her merry band of Portland trailblazers (see what I did there?).

You should of course buy Birk’s book Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet, but in the meantime, take heed of her “50 Keys to Transforming Communities and Empowering People, One Pedal Stroke at a Time” (PDF). These 50 principles are not earth-shattering, and most of them are obvious when you think about them; they amount to a mix of traditional community organizing tactics, common-sense urban design principles, and social equity.

If you want a bike-friendlier community — or just a community that doesn’t take for granted that everyone drives alone in a car — you could do worse than starting with Birk’s principles — they’re a system that works if you work it. I’m going to write about these one at a time to try to illuminate them a bit from my own experience.

First in a series. Next post

It is a moral stain on the United States of America that there is a law on the books at the federal level that treats families like mine as though we are less worthy than others. We are taxed disproportionately and unjustly; we are excluded from basic rights of family and inheritance; we risk losing our children. Over a thousand protections, rights, and benefits are denied to us, with no public policy justification, no justification at all other than tribal panic on the part of a mostly elderly minority of Americans; and in an increasing number of states, they are denied to us over the objections of the people in our own communities.

And, in this Republican primary season, the candidates are competing to out-pander each other by saying things about families like mine that most of them (excepting Rick Santorum) probably don’t even believe.

DOMA will not be law in ten years; demographics will see to that. But in the meantime, it is a disgusting shame, the worst kind of political pandering codified into statute.

For more information about the damage done by DOMA and the families who are hurt, visit Why Marriage Matters, a project of Freedom to Marry. The Legal Stranger Project is attempting to document the ways in which DOMA damages families and betrays the so-called ideals of its supporters. Please learn, then fight back: tell your legislators that you support DOMA repeal, follow the campaign, speak up in your own community, put your money where your mouth is. Your voice matters.

For the umpteenth time in my lifetime and yours, the ACLU has stood up for a basic public right, and someone else has blinked. This time, it was the barricades around Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy movement.

I biked past there on Friday morning, and the park was sealed off and empty, despite being public space. The New York Civil Liberties Union (our local ACLU affiliate), along with the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, sent this letter (PDF) to the NYC Department of Buildings (the agency having jurisdiction, given that Zuccotti is private property made over as public space pursuant to a zoning waiver agreement), laying out the facts of the basic statutory argument calling for the park to be opened. They stopped short of the constitutional argument, which seems to run in the same direction.

It seemed likely that these entities would have taken legal action to compel enforcement of the law and open the park, and rather than face that, the DOB blinked, and the barricades were removed today. This is the right result. I have mixed feelings about Occupy, but the park should be open; the conflict in my mind reflects a conflict in our community, and that latter conflict should play out in public, not be frozen out by metal barricades and deflected by police shields.

It’s easy to take the ACLU for granted if you’re a progressive — you expect it to just always be there, and it usually is. But its persistence and its moral authority, in the face of aggressive hostility from the extreme right, are both due to its members. If you genuinely believe in civil liberties — the right to assemble, the right to say what you believe and to practice your religion (or no religion) and to hold public authorities to a high standard of transparency and constitutional accountability — then you should be one of those members. Join here in New York State or here nationally.

The governor, prodded by Christine Quinn, has called upon New York City to stop fingerprinting applicants for food benefits, which according to a City Council analysis deters 20,000 people from claiming needed aid they are eligible for. That’s 20,000 families going hungry unnecessarily, for fear of fraud.

But the scale of actual fraud is tiny (as is virtually always the case when fraud is cited). The city says that in the last fiscal year, $4 million was saved through fingerprinting, through 1,200 duplications. 1.8 million people in New York City receive food stamps, meaning that the fraud rate is two-thirds of a tenth of one percent. Or, put another way, the number of families going hungry because of this policy is 17 times the number of fraud cases. Isn’t something wrong here?

I just saw NYC human resources commissioner Robert Doar on NY1 calling fingerprinting a simple and effective measure, but I doubt that the sort of people Doar (and Bloomberg) run with would put up with being fingerprinted so easily. Doar is a good guy, and should have enough sense to understand that New York City’s most vulnerable are the very ones who need fewer hurdles to jump, not more. Not to mention that even hungry people are entitled to a full measure of human dignity. Not being able to afford enough to eat is not a crime.

Gregor Poynton tweeted this article by Dan Schawbel from the Time website. Its main contention is that “employees in the Gen Y, or millennial, demographic — those born between roughly 1982 and 1993 — are overturning the traditional workday,” through flexible hours, job-sharing, freelancing, and so forth.

I understand what Schawbel is saying — certainly things have changed since the Gen Yers’ parents’ generation (which is, roughly, the generation midway between my parents and me — I graduated from high school in 1983). But the analysis of why, and how pervasively, seems a bit facile to me.

I mean, this is certainly true, and a good thing, for a relatively narrow stratum of highly empowered and self-actualized white-collar workers — people with good educations, marketable skills, and strong personal brands (Schwabel’s specialty), which includes me and Schwabel and almost everyone who works at Time.com, and most people we deal with professionally. So, yay us!

But the day-to-day world is operated not by people who blog and work for marketing agencies (like me and Schwabel), but by people who make donuts and build bridges and clean up after our grandparents in nursing homes — and almost none of those people (or, for that matter, their managers) are being released from the constraints of routine. It’s very nice to say “Gen Y workers won’t accept jobs where they can’t access Facebook,” but a lot of the people in those age groups — the majority? — don’t get to be so fussy. That was true at the height of the last economic boom, and it’s much truer now than it was then.

I thought Matt Yglesias’ take on the economic policy debate as just another culture war issue was right on the money. The sorts of people who live empowered Gen-X and Gen-Y lives (and I certainly include myself), especially the childless and well-paid, don’t ever have to make the choices that many middle-class people (nevermind working-class people) have to make, and it’s harder for us to empathize with those choices than we would like to think.

I’m reading the detailed press release about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address, and I have to say I’m impressed. (No, I’m not watching the video; who the hell has time for that? but you can, if you want, here.) I was prepared to be impressed, based on the buzz, but I’m quite a bit more impressed than I expected.

The guy has turned out to be a better communicator than I expected, a better political operator than I expected (hello! gay marriage in New York!), and a much more committed progressive than I expected. I suppose the latter should have been expected — he was quite progressive at HUD — but after a few years in the governor’s office (or “on the second floor in Albany,” as I recently learned the insiders say), he’s really hitting his stride.

This isn’t a PlaNYC 2030, but there’s still a lot of meat in here — “no kid hungry,” “Office for New Americans,” economic development, energy efficiency, public service training. He proposed building an enormous convention center in Queens, for God’s sake, and freeing up the windswept Javits zone on the West Side for dense mixed-use development, patching a hole in the city and bringing organic life to a part of Manhattan that’s gone artificial. In a year in which my home state of California seems mired in budgetary troubles that seem they may never end, it’s exciting to see the governor of my adopted state reaching so high.